Guide widening more than roads

Tim Newcomb
Tribune assistant editor

Workers create a new wetlands area on Larson Road off Guide Meridian Road.

WHATCOM -- The state is building more than just roads during the two-phased Guide Meridian widening project.
  The two-lane highway is being turned into five lanes in a nearly five-mile stretch from Horton Road to Ten Mile Road and then into four lanes over the four miles from there to Lynden. But in addition, 20 retention ponds and four wetlands mitigation projects will also be completed.
  Following state law, the Washington State Department of Transportation is required to build 20 retention ponds, 10 each on the southern and the northern sections, to trap and filter road runoff.
  The agency must also replace any wetlands or streams displaced by construction.
  The retention ponds total 24 acres, while the wetlands mitigation comes to nearly 42 acres.
  And these requirements come with a price tag.
  Bronlea Mishler, DOT spokesperson, said that while it can be quite difficult to calculate, roughly 20 to 25 percent of the construction budget for each project is used to create the ponds and the new wetlands, which means that roughly $11 million is needed for the northern section and $7 million for the southern portion.
  Doug Ericksen, 42nd District state legislator, said he thinks that the actual cost is higher and that the Department of Ecology is to blame for countless hoops DOT is forced to jump through -- costing the taxpayers time (delays in permits) and money.

The ponds
  All 10 ponds on the southern section are completed and most of the 10 northern ponds are still under construction, Mishler said.
  The ponds are designed to trap and filter runoff from the new roadway in order to clean the water before it returns to area streams, in compliance with the federal Clean Water Act.   The number of ponds is determined by the size of the area’s natural drainage basin and in an effort to cause the least impact to the environment.
  The ponds treat the water and return it to its own drainage area. The ponds are also designed to slow the flow of water from the roadway, easing erosion concerns.
  In times of flooding, the ponds can fill up and still work to ease the heavy flow of water.
  Ditches are used to handle off-site water, but filtration is required for roadway runoff.

Wetlands mitigation
  There are four sites that serve as wetlands mitigation for the Guide project.
  Mitigation replaces any wetlands, streams or other natural environment deemed necessary to the native wildlife that was lost when the road was constructed. Wetlands mitigation often means creating a natural habitat for wildlife through native plants and/or stream creation.
  One site was created on 4.32 acres on Wiser Lake and another is a 1.4-acre site at Larson Road. The other two locations are off-site.
  The DOT was unable to acquire the needed amount of land adjacent to the project, so it purchased a total of 46 acres along Highway 9 and the South Fork of the Nooksack River. A 26-acre site near Potter Road and a 20-acre site off Strand Road (only 10 acres of which is for the Guide project) serve to fulfill the needed mitigation requirements.

The process
  “The DOT is trapped into a bad situation,” Ericksen said. “The permitting system is structured to slow down projects and make them more expensive.”
  Ericksen said that Ecology is actively working to ensure that roads are not built by inflating the costs to build them by stretching out a laborious permitting system and requiring overkill on retention ponds and wetlands.
  Katie Skipper, Ecology spokesperson, said that simply isn’t the case.
  In fact, she said, Ecology convened a forum of business owners, farmers and environmental specialists to see how they could improve the process because it understands that the “process takes longer than anyone would like.”
  “We should receive our recommendations by the end of the month on how to make the process more efficient and ways to go about creating faster and different mitigation options,” Skipper said.
  “The people in Ecology make rules that are excessive,” Ericksen added. “One of the goals of Ecology is to make it as expensive as possible so that we make fewer roads.”
  Ericksen said that the large mitigation efforts on the South Fork of the Nooksack River cost millions of dollars for a “minimal benefit.”
  “It is the fault of Ecology and its rules and regulations,” he said.
  Ericksen, instead, proposes that the state Legislature allow mitigation dollars to be used to purchase the development rights off farmland, and then reclassify that as wetland.
  “It would make it easier and cheaper for road construction, fund a program widely supported by farmers, protect agricultural land (instead of lose it as in the latest mitigation project) and help keep land in a tax paying situation,” he said. When the DOT buys land, it is taken off the tax rolls.
  Skipper said that the law is clear -- and the public has made it evident that it supports the law -- that mitigation needs to be done on a one-to-one basis.
  Created wetlands have a harder time succeeding than natural wetlands, Skipper said, and by simply classifying something as wetland when it really isn’t defeats the goal of having no net loss of wetlands.
  “Relaxing that rule has the potential to do more damage,” Skipper said. “That is not the goal.”
  “The Department of Ecology is not solution-oriented,” Ericksen said. “We can save dollars and get projects done all while protecting the environment.”
  Skipper said that it isn’t the goal of Ecology to slow down the process or make it harder or more cumbersome.
  She said that the department wants its road-building projects to go forward and be successful, and a healthy environment leads to a healthy economy and healthy people.
  She agreed that it is “complicated” to work through so many “different layers” when figuring out how to transport people through farmland and wetlands, but the goal for no net loss to the environment actually supports the region’s economy.
  “The goal is to get a permit process in place that is efficient and in the end have an environmental system and project in place that does what they say they will do,” Skipper added.

Update
  Construction work on the southern portion of the Guide project is done, with the exception of paving a portion of road over Deer Creek, at a total cost of $66.3 million.
  Work on the northern section is ongoing and expected to be completed in late 2009 at a total cost of $106.7 million.
  E-mail Tim Newcomb at tim@lyndentribune.com.